Ya. You could also say our brains are just big wet, mushy containers for neurons …. Which is just a moist way of storing and processing fancy matrices.

I misphrased, I meant to say all learning/adaptive AI systems are matrix based.

Symbolic systems are hard coded, and can't learn or adapt to new input data, they can exclusively handle inputs that were explicitly hard coded into the system. Symbolic AI systems also imo are a bit of a misnomer nowadays, as they kind of blur the line between AI and just any old programming script. Arguably any code that contains even a single "if" or "switch" statement to handle an external input is technically symbolic AI, which includes almost every type of script and program in existence, making the term somewhat useless. Input gender -> if gender = M: output "hello sir" else if gender = F: output "hello madam" else: output "hello" is a symbolic AI. and with the prevelance of trained AI nowadays, I wouldn't really consider it useful or descriptive to call symbolic systems AI, as opposed to just calling them a script/program.

Though that doesn't invalidate my general point. If you're upset about calling a complex matrix network AI because it's "just matrices" then Symbolic systems would be even less "worthy" of that term, they're just a list of "if else" statements. So my general point still stands, by OPs standards, literally nothing could ever be called AI, even a perfect simulation of an entire human brain with true artificial consciousness wouldn't be worthy of the term "AI" by OPs logic.

LLMs are just fancy autocomplete.

I don't think ion channels are small enough for quantum interactions to be significant. Do you have any source for quantum interactions in neurons?

It would still be matrices. Just matrices that include quantum effects.